The ‘Anthropocene event’ has put geology and a few geologists centre stage, but conflicts arose within this scientific realm that sometimes had little to do with science. The geologist and palaeontologist Jan Zalasiewicz, emeritus professor at the University of Leicester, interviewed here, is a well‑known scientist. Responding to the decision made by a subcommission of the International Union of Geological Sciences, he made the point that, based on current research, there is undisputable scientific evidence that supports the concept that the Earth has entered a new geological epoch. The atmospheric chemist and Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen called this epoch the ‘Anthropocene’.

A statement by Jean Genet, from 1973, about how art does not easily submit to the political categories of left and right, is the subject of a commentary in verse form — or perhaps rather a gloss or interpretation which extends it – by Regina Guimarães, a figure of many crafts and talents, in the realms of poetry, cinema, theatre and music.

Jean Malaurie, scientific explorer of the polar regions and defender of the rights of Arctic minorities, ethnohistorian, geographer and writer, was also director of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, in Paris, and founder of the prestigious Terre Humaine book collection, which he directed. He is the author of a wide-ranging bibliography, including The Last Kings of Thule, which has become a classic. Ethnohistorian and art anthropologist Giulia Bogliolo Bruna, his collaborator, and author of Jean Malaurie: une énergie créatrice [Jean Malaurie: a creative energy], writes for Electra about this scholar whose life was a novel.

Jean Starobinski, who died last March in Geneva, his hometown, has been described as the greatest literary critic of the 20th century. But ‘literary critic’ does not do justice to this man who held degrees in classical studies and medicine (he worked as a hospital intern for five years). He showed great insight in his analysis of the history of ideas, literature and art, and practiced thematic reading and interpretation like no other. The history and representations of melancholy recurrently appear in his work, as mentioned by António Guerreiro, whose text recovers part of an interview given by ‘Staro’, as his friends called him, during a conference in Porto in July, 1990. Author of a brilliant study on Rousseau, he left a lasting mark on 18th-century studies. It was mainly from that era’s soil and subsoil that he took the mask motif, which radiates throughout his work and attaches itself to his own face. This is shown by Barbara Chitussi, who continues here the interpretation of Starobinski’s work initiated in an essay entitled Jean Starobinski e la conoscibilità della maschera.

This testimony of a young high-school teacher on the outskirts of Paris speaks of a highly optimistic relationship with students that have been labelled problematic. Going against the most persistent stereotypes, she reveals how, unexpectedly, the students believe in the Republican values on which French schools are founded.
 

In this section, we show unpublished work by one of the most highly regarded photographers working today: Jo Ractliffe. This South African artist, whose career dates back thirty-five years, is included in the collections of some of the world’s major art institutions, such as MoMA and the Met (New York), the Tate Modern (London) and the Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam). To mark her new retrospective (Drives) at the renowned Art Institute of Chicago, we reveal some never before seen photos that Ractliffe took in Angola, shot at places such as the port of Luanda, the Boavista neighbourhood and the Roque Santeiro Market. What attracted her was to see ‘how people were making their way in this wild chaotic sprawl of a city, full of post-war energy and enterprise and the contradictory promise of a new future’. Afonso Dias Ramos presents this important contemporary artist and her work for Electra in an essay written especially for this issue.

This portfolio by João Penalva, an artist widely renowned for works that combine video, installation, photography, music, performance, text and image, showcases a number of unpublished pictures: a series of black-and-white photographs taken during his walks across London, in a way that visually resembles the painted canvases of Abstract Expressionism, as the art historian Afonso Dias Ramos comments in the accompanying essay.

Joaquim Pinto’s importance is not solely measured in the films that he has directed since 1988, alone or in collaboration with Nuno Leonel, or in those he has produced. He also introduced to Portuguese cinema a sound quality that had been sorely lacking. His artistic and technical trajectory is defined by the extreme experience of a body fighting against deadly invaders recounted in the intimate and self-reflexive tone of his latest film, which urges us to look beyond this portrait of the man, and the autobiographical material and work.

Jocelyne Saab was a French-Lebanese filmmaker, active from 1970 to 2019. Since she died on January 7th, 2019, her work has been (re)discovered by the younger generation of Lebanese, Arab and international filmmakers that claim their affiliation with this audacious form of political cinema. A witness of her time, Jocelyne Saab made films that wrote another history of the last 30 years of the 20th century in the Middle East.

The American photographer John Divola has prepared a set of unpublished works for this edition of Electra. They are part of an ongoing series located in an air force base in the California desert that was decommissioned after the Cold War came to an end, and which has since remained like a veritable city in ruins. It is not the first time that John Divola aesthetically intervenes in abandoned spaces and then captures the results on film. As Afonso Dias Ramos demonstrates in the following essay introducing Divola’s work, the visual explorations that have been undertaken during this pandemic actually take up the artistic strategies that had marked his early oeuvre, in a surprising throwback of nearly half a century that is also a revisitation of contemporary art history. The images shown in this «Scoop» foreground ruins as a way to reposition photography in direct interaction with painting, sculpture, and installation, and thereby declining any distinctions between the witness or the participant, between the intervention and the document.